Virgin Media Discussion Thread

Lord Alibaski · 3 Nov 2021 at 18:00

Right mate if I gave virgin a 30 day notice I would have to pay the rest of my contract which would cost me £96 because I am still under contract until 31st January 2022. The reason with me going with BT is they will pay all my termination fees, that's not making anything complicated.

The only complicated thing about all this was the free upgrade VM/o2 offered their customers hence me asking should i stay with VM or jump ship to BT, the answers I have received have helped perfectly. So tomorrow I will be terminating my contract with VM and signing on with BT.

Nothing complicated at all.

thewanted · 4 Nov 2021 at 09:31

Has anyone managed to get their hands on a SuperHub 5 yet and test it?

Ayahuasca · 4 Nov 2021 at 09:42

I've seen some TBB graphs for those who have it on other forums and it doesn't look that promising so far. Still have ridiculous latency spikes, jitter seems slightly improved.

Caged · 4 Nov 2021 at 09:53

Aren't latency spikes just a feature of the VM network?

ChrisD. · 4 Nov 2021 at 09:57

Caged said:
Aren't latency spikes just a feature of the VM network?

Mostly yeah.

brendy · 4 Nov 2021 at 10:00

thewanted said:
Has anyone managed to get their hands on a SuperHub 5 yet and test it?

Not yet, getting pings between 45-55ms on Warzone, would love that to be a little lower, not sure if its the Puma chip causing it or not on my M350 service.

clone · 4 Nov 2021 at 10:04

So I got my hub 4 yesterday to replace the hub 3 do I really need to send the old one back?

xb8browney · 4 Nov 2021 at 10:05

Yes or if you ignore the emails they'll collect it

thewanted · 4 Nov 2021 at 10:08

Ayahuasca said:
I've seen some TBB graphs for those who have it on other forums and it doesn't look that promising so far. Still have ridiculous latency spikes, jitter seems slightly improved.

Damn, that sucks. My FTTC contract finishes at the end of this month and I am tempted by VM just for a bit more speed, but since my partner and I now work from home permanently, I am really worried about switching to a less stable service.

EDIT: This is my next door neighbour's 100mbit VM service. Doesn't look great to me.

Ayahuasca · 4 Nov 2021 at 10:22

I'm on Gig1 with a Hub 4 and my graph (mainly maximum latency variation) is around as good as it gets for VM without playing around with additional hardware and software configurations. That said, I'm in a relatively new area so new equipment and I imagine fewer subscribers per population. Minimum latency looks high due to distance to the TBB server. My graphs on M500 with a Hub 3 used to look like the above.

iMacMart · 4 Nov 2021 at 11:45

Ayahuasca said:
I'm on Gig1 with a Hub 4 and my graph (mainly maximum latency variation) is around as good as it gets for VM without playing around with additional hardware and software configurations. That said, I'm in a relatively new area so new equipment and I imagine fewer subscribers per population. Minimum latency looks high due to distance to the TBB server. My graphs on M500 with a Hub 3 used to look like the above.

Can I ask what you pay for the GIG1 please?

Ayahuasca · 4 Nov 2021 at 11:50

iMacMart said:
Can I ask what you pay for the GIG1 please?

£54 a month, that's with a £10 discount applied every month.

Will be interesting to see what they charge for Gig2 when it comes around. I wonder if they'll reshuffle all the packages and price points, otherwise, it could get quite silly once you're out of your first contract with some discount applied.

Avalon · 4 Nov 2021 at 12:05

SH3/M500, I can't really complain about that as it gets used. Soon to be replaced with a SH4 or hopefully 5/Gig1.

shiver · 4 Nov 2021 at 13:55

M500 with SH3 too

Rainmaker · 4 Nov 2021 at 14:46

Gig1 with SH4 here.

As I said in my earlier post, it's possible to get an *almost* FTTP-like BQM with decent QoS set up. I shaved less than 5 megs off my up and down speeds by enabling fq_codel, and this was the result (on a day with a lot of torrenting):

whereas before, on the line as-is with no tweaks:

Check your routers people (if you have a third party one). Anything like fq_codel, bbr or (best of all) cake will stand you in good stead.

chroniclard · 4 Nov 2021 at 14:56

My minimums/averages seem much lower than some of the ones above.

Are we saying a decent router could smooth out the max latency/yellow?

M600, modem mode SH3, Linksys wifi router

Thinking of getting a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro and a couple of access points then binning the Linksys.

ahar · 4 Nov 2021 at 15:10

thewanted said:
Damn, that sucks. My FTTC contract finishes at the end of this month and I am tempted by VM just for a bit more speed, but since my partner and I now work from home permanently, I am really worried about switching to a less stable service.

EDIT: This is my next door neighbour's 100mbit VM service. Doesn't look great to me.

Looks much like mine

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Ayahuasca · 4 Nov 2021 at 15:13

chroniclard said:
My minimums/averages seem much lower than some of the ones above.

Pretty sure we covered it before but the minimum (and average for the most part) is just related to your ping to the TBB server and has little bearing on anything really. Anyone further north will be around 20ms. Your average whilst lower overall actually shows quite a bit more variation during peak hours than many of the above.

Max latency and dropped packets are the big ones for showing the state of your connection. Thankfully, VM seems to have addressed a lot of the issues with the latter.

With regard to the router, you just need something that has the QoS features that rainmaker mentioned.

chroniclard · 4 Nov 2021 at 15:21

Yeah but if the average latency variation is 8-12 rather than 18-22.....suppose thats the same thing though with distance.

I am pretty happy with the connection, just the question above about smoothing the yellow.

Rainmaker · 4 Nov 2021 at 15:23

chroniclard said:
Are we saying a decent router could smooth out the max latency/yellow?

Yes, absolutely. You need to set up some kind of congestion control algorithm (as I said, fq_codel, cake, bbr) which will lose you a few megs on your up/downstream, but it's worth it. I can hammer my line now and still get almost my original full speed (about 935 megs down and 46 megs up), but my line stays extremely responsive for multiple users. Even when a torrent or other download/upload is going full whack it's almost perfect, especially compared to the mess that was there before I implemented the changes.

Yesterday I updated my Linux ISO collection (actually not a euphemism!) for the month, and had torrents running for almost 24h including seeding back. My BQM for yesterday shows the worst case for me now that I have fq_codel set up. Note that the singular red spike around lunch time was an intentional router reboot for updates: